Him:I don’t remember that part of the
continuity at all, but if you want to keep track of it…

Me: Well, someone’s got to.It’s all in
m’head.

Him:That’s true.

Me:Yeah.

Him:Everything’s in your head.

Me:Along with your, ummm…

Him:Along with me.

Me:Ha!No!You’re not imaginary.

Him:I am.

Me:No more than this sea badger
is.Well, it’s imaginary at the moment,
but not for long... Right!Who did we see first?

Mystery Voice:

Him:Well, that’s up to you.

Me:We saw Stewart Lee first.

Him:Yeah.

Me:It was a smaller venue than we saw
him in last year, and it was a work in progress.

Him:Well, I wasn’t there last
year.I kind of was, because I am you,
but…

Me:Yeah, so…Actually…Apart from the Pun Run last year, that was the first – ah, no it’s
not.The Socks’re comedy…It was more traditional stand-up.

Him:What were you going to class the
Socks as, if not comedy?

Me:They’re not stand-up though…

Him:The Clocks!

Me: The Scottish Falsetto Clock Puppet
Theatre!I don’t know how that would
work.I’ve done enough on clocks
recently what with Watchmen and Suicide Squadand-

Him:Oh!Not that again!

Me:So, Stewart Lee…You’ve seen the Comedy Vehicle.

Him:Yes.But the Comedy Vehicle was too good and too
many people were watching it.

Me:So the BBC killed it?

Him:Yeah.

Me: To see where all these golden eggs
were coming from.It was more of a
traditional show that he did.

Him:That’s definitely something you’ve
said.

Me:We had great seats for that
show.We were right at the front and-

Him:We weren’t right at the front.

Me:Well, tucked up to the side.

Him:There’s such a thing as being too
close to Stewart Lee.

Me: Ha!What, on the stage?Close enough
that he can steal your pint?

Him:The seats up front were on the
stage!

Me:They’re always like that.It’s totally different to a music gig where
you’ve got-

Him:I’d have felt a bit threatened
being that close to Stewart Lee.

Me:-burly people in tight t-shirts,
hearing voices in their ears and stopping the great unwashed getting too close
to the gods of the stage…Yeah, I
thought it was really good.He looked
like he was enjoying himself.

Him:And the drinks!The drinks were in glass!Glasses.Glasses made of glass.

Me:Yeah!Which isn't something you get in a music
venue, either.

Him:No.

Mystery Voice:

Me:No.And
you be- you met him.

Him:I don’t remember betting him.

Me:You bet you could make a horror movie, and
then next thing you know: Manos.

Him:'Mangoes'.

Me: 'Cans of Fruit'.

Him:My rendition of Manos would be
swell.

Me:How would it go?

Him:It would star me.Well, it would be Manos, but with me.

Me:Would you do all the parts?

Him:Yeah.I would.

Me: How would you do Torgo?

Him:Um…Carefully.

Me:Give me an example.

Him:Oh, you want to hear some of the
lines?Well, I’ve been doing some of the
motions there for a little bit.

Me:Yeah, but that doesn’t really help
people who are reading this.I mean even
digital-As interactive as this is, and
it is ergodic literature, you’ve still got to-

Him:Hang on, this is being typed up,
isn’t it?

Me: Yeah.

Him:So it doesn’t matter.

Me:No.

Him:Alright.So…This is how I would do Torgo.

Me:You’re not going to make an
effort and put on a voice?

Him:I did put on a voice.Me: You never put on a voice!

Him:I did put on a voice!

Me:You always do it in your own voice. Even when I complain, “Do the voice!” you never do!

Him:I just did do a voice!I did the Torgo voice.It was about as Torgo as it gets.I’m still doing it now.

Me:But that’s the way you always talk.

Him:No, it’s not.

Me: Wait a minute…Are you… Torgo?So, who did we see second?

Him:Well, it wasn’t Torgo.

Me:It wasn’t Torgo.It was Katherine Ryan.

Mystery Voice:

Him:I think we spent too long talking
about Torgo actually, given that he has absolutely nothing to do with the
situation at hand.

Me:It’s fine.

Him:Alright.So, Katherine Ryan.

Me: Uh huh.

Him:Did you enjoy yourself?

Me:I thought it was great.Like I said, her star’s been in the ascendancy ever since I held her baby…In a tiny oven, about two years ago, with the Mystery Voice.We were in the front row for that one
and…Yeah…

Him:You should stop – y’know – stalking
Katherine Ryan.

Me:I’m not stalking Katherine
Ryan.We just go and see her show and
give her money.It’s not the same as
stalking somebody.

Me:I said I was bearing up, but she
couldn’t hear what I was saying.I
became quite conscious that I was accidentally derailing the gig and…I should just’ve said…I don’t know.“My leg’s fallen off,” or something.

Him:Am fine.

Me:‘Am fine’?

Him:Am fine.

Me:That sounds like someone that would
write romance novels.Actually…Isn’t Anne Fine a writer?

Him:You would know that.

Me:And the, after the gig – which was
great – we malingered around outside.We
hung round in the rain, and then she came out.

Him:Yeah.About half an hour after everyone else had
left.She’d seen us and was, like, “Sigh.Let’s just get this over with.”

Me:She wasn’t at all like that!She was lovely.

Him:She waited as long as she could,
but we just weren’t leaving.

Me:She gave me a hug.

Him:Yes.

Me:And we got a photo that no-one’ll
ever see.

Him:Yes.That even you will never see.

Me: She signed your ticket too.

Him:I don’t know where you put that.

Me:It’s just above this section in the
blog.

Him:Okay.

Mystery Voice:

Me:So, the second day…In the morning we went into the Arctic and
had a look around, and then late afternoon we headed up to see the Socks.

Him:Yes.

Me: That was… So, what was the theme of
the Socks this year?

Him:Why…Why did you look at the ceiling when you
asked that?

Me:I dunno.I thought I might’ve been having a stroke-

Him:It was confusing.
Me:Yeah.Exactly.Everything went a bit swimmy.Yeah, so… Erm…So, what was the
theme of the Socks show, this year?

Him:It was Shakespeare.

Me: And was it good?

Him:Yes.

Me:Was it very good?

Him:Are you going to give your thoughts
on any of these or are you just going to ask me repeated…?

Me:I’ll stick them in at the bottom.1

Him:Repeated questions.Me: I’ll stick them in at the bottom.

Him:You can say that all you like.

Me:Yeah, but it won’t make for a very
interesting read.It was great, wasn’t
it?

Him:Wait.First of all you go through and pretend
you’re talking to someone else so you can write up your reactions-

Me:Yeah.

Him:Then, afterwards, you write up your
reactions.

Me: Yeah.One day, I’ll have a syndrome named after
me.We’ve written over a quarter of a million
words on this blog.

Him:Do you…even need to pretend that you’re talking to
anyone else?

Me:Doing your voice hurts my
throat.And makes me sneeze.

Him:It just makes you look insane.

Me:Yeah.Do you know what the really difficult bit is?

Him:What?

Me: You have to use the second set of
vocal cords for doing – when you do throat singing, you access your second
cords.That’s the only way I can do the
moments we talk across each other.Using
the two voices at the same time is very, very difficult.

Him:But…You’re typing this up.

Me:I know.

Him:And we’re not talking across each
other.

Me:No, but-

Him:Because there’s no way to type
that.

Me: No, but I have to do it in such a
way that it sounds like two people speaking.It was great, the Socks’ show was great.And afterwards, their manager – the wonderful Kev Sutherland-

Him:Yis.

Me:- took us for drinks.

Him:Well, he took you for drinks.

Me:That’s true.

Him:Because I’m not real.

Me:No.

Him:Ethereal beings don’t need to
drink.Mystery Voice:

Me:That’s true!The Mystery Voice got orange juice-

Mystery Voice:

Him:Yas.

Me:I got my sparkling water, and I had
to go up and pour yours into plastic glasses from the water jug on the bar and
put them in the space where you’d be sitting if you existed.Mr Sutherland was really good though and didn’t mention
it once.We had a good natter about
things and stuff.I thought it was
great.The show was…The show was more together than last
year.You laughed a lot.

Him:Yeah, it was good.It was very good.

Me:Hell of a lot of work’s gone into
it.Some of it’s incredibly clever.Right, after that we kind of squared-off a
circle.This isn’t part of the Fringe
‘review’, but we went to see Finding Dory.

Him:That was not at the Edinburgh
Fringe.

Me:No.I think we should mention it because…I’d like to capture your thoughts in this sort-of digital amber.When we came out of it – because we stayed
right to the end – it felt…To me it
felt as though it really – and not all sequels do it – it felt like an incredibly
well-crafted conclusion to the story begun in Finding Nemo.

Him:Like the second Godfather film?

Me:Yeah.It dovetailed together so well .A lot of care and love and effort-

Him:That’s why it’s taken so long.

Me:Yeah.

Him:It hasn’t been churned out a year
after the original film came out.

Him: At the start I made up a joke about
seeing someone escape from a van and, only after the film did I realise there
was a better joke to be had, in that they’d been advertising fish fingers before
a film about sentient fish.

Me:Ha!It was really harsh!“If you’ve
enjoyed this film, why not eat the cast?There’s a restaurant only fifteen yards from this cinema.”

Him:Ha!

Mystery Voice:

Me:Right, we better wrap up there,
so…I’ll explain why the square’s a
circle and write up the other stuff underneath this…Can you make the noise of a sea badger,
please?

The Him makes the noise of a sea badger, using all his cords.

Me: And, on that bombshell…

The Him’s Socks Review.It’s a tradition, or an old charter or
something.

There’s a mountain ledge in the Arctic’s Werewolf Country that’s clear of snow
this time of the year.It’s high enough
to allow you to look down on the clouds, but the road to the ledge
is often closed, even in ‘Summer’.The seasonal melt releases incredible amounts of water
to piss joyfully down the slopes, dislodging boulders that bounce like rolled
cheeses onto any vehicle unlucky enough to be grinding up the ascent at the
time.I neglected to mention this might
be a factor to the Mystery Voice, which is mostly why he agreed to drive up
there in the first place.

A lifetime ago I took the Him to see Finding Nemo at a cinema that doesn’t
exist anymore.I’m not sure, but it
might well be the first time he’d even gone to the pictures.4

We’d lost all coverage as the road started rising, so the Mystery
Voice had to rely on my directions.He’s
obviously braver than anyone realises.We reached
the ledge and parked up.Within seconds
of getting out, all of us were drenched.The ground falls away quickly there, thousands of steep feet lead to a plain sprinkled
with trainset-sized Christmas trees.All
the life-threatening torrents are distant enough to look like tears running down a wall.The further away
you are, the more real it feels; the way patterns naturally repeat becomes more
obvious.The air tastes white and the
border between the world below and the other one are thin enough for you to
feel fictional. If you’re prepared to
look, to properly look, then you can get a brief glimpse of how time works.

They skinned the cinema first, exposing its concrete skeleton and hidden
chambers.Discarded slabs that used to
be walls were ground and smashed by bright yellow machines, until they were rendered
removable.The walls of a cinema hold
dreams and memories in the same way a mountain stores fossils.But cash, like rust, doesn’t understand
sentimentality.

There are tributes scattered around the ledge, looking into the valley and the
clouds.Flowers, bleached cards, metal
plaques: all of them mementos mori.The
dead see things differently.

The Him and myself watched Finding Dory in Europe's tallest car park disguised as a
cinema.The film itself is
stunning.Individual grains of sand fall
and clump, foam foams, scales sheen, all of it a tribute to Moore’s Law.There’s something else though, something
lurking inbetween the callous certainty of cold binary.It’s like a ghost, but ghosts aren’t
real.The Turing Test misses the same,
most obvious, test of what it is to be human, that English exams do.Y’see, there’s no difference between low art
and high art, and there never was.Art
isn’t objective, agendas are.Does it
move you?Does it make you feel?Does it tell you something about
yourself?It’s not enough to know how it
was made, or even why it was made – those explanations are almost always
wrong anyway – the only thing that matters is that it’s there, and that encountering
it changes something in the you that lives behind your eyes.Shifts it.Maybe only momentarily, maybe for the rest of
your life – avalanches gotta start somewhere, after all – but there’s a reaction
to it that takes place on an animal level.That’s all that matters. That’s all that counts.

After twenty minutes there were still no werewolves, so we got back in the car.The creatures we used to be watched us turn
back onto the shrinking ribbon and head downhill, growing steadily less
distinct.Eventually we vanished into
the cloud and they went home.

2.You pays yer money, you takes yer
choice.

3.Arf.Just kidding.I’d only type
something like that if I was passing myself off a ‘professional writer’,
darling.

4.It definitely wasn’t the first film
he saw though.That was The Wolf Man,
which remains one of the few watchable films set in Wales.Certainly the best one with a werewolf in it.

Thursday, 11 August 2016

Dad was much more… witty.Umm…I
remember watching a particularly inane dance routine with him on television
once, and he turned to me and said, “I don’t think this will ever replace
entertainment."- John Cleese, Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer’s Cut)

That American optimism... I think it
does speak to, now that we’re a global family, what it means to police the
world and how hard that is.- Zack Snyder

An eternal story of love and loss, set
against the backdrop of an abortive alien invasion. Though you don’t actually
find out it’s abortive till the end of the show. It’s my Romeo and Juliet. But
less whiny.- Garth Marenghi

Let’s start with some basics.

Comics are a medium and superheroes are a genre within that
medium.A genre aimed at children. Specifically, American children.During
the period that folk in the UK are currently lucky enough to think of as 'post-War',
there’s been some clever cultural sleight-of-hand blurring those
basics.And that’s far from the worst of
it.

Work-made-for-hire is a concept that consumers seem happy to ignore when
nostalgia’s involved.If I were to
compare Marvel and DC to Burger King and McDonalds, it might seem an irrelevant
stretch.Stick with it though, because
by the time I do make that comparison, many people reading this will already be
so annoyed they might miss the opportunity to become further enraged.

This may sting.Ready?

DC need Suicide Squad to be a financial success.It’s essential to them.Or rather, it was, because at the time of typing it’s
already obvious that, despite an exceptional opening weekend, this film’s going
to die on its arse.Now, before going
any further, let’s make it very clear that when the covering of backsides and
throwing of blame really gets going, DC will forget that there's absolutely
nobody responsible for the critical and financial kicking other than
themselves.Suicide Squad, like Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice Team America (and FANT4STIC before that) are exactly the movies that they wanted.The buck stops
with them.

You’ve read this far, so I’ll stop teasing you by telling you the result up
front and then showing my working afterwards: Suicide Squad is not just a terrible film, it’s also an extremely scary
one.

Suicide Squad is a mash-up of two different edits.The first is the film that director David Ayer turned in(this edit has
an orchestral soundtrack), the second is the remix that the folk who spliced the
trailers together came up with (this is the edit that sounds like someone forgot to remove the temp score). The final cut-and-shut currently stinking up flea-pits all over the world (with the exception of most
of Mexico and all of China, who saw this faecal tsunami coming) has been welded together by DC’s accountants, and they've produced a disastrous pile-up, lacking the integrity of even Alien Vs Predator.1

Suicide Squad contains no thrills, no laughs, no engagement, no jeopardy, no
surprises and, most damning of all, no soul.Manos: The Hands of Fate is often cited as one of the worst films of all
time, but if you ignore its technical deficiencies, Manos is a far superior film to Suicide Squad
because its intentions were at least honourable: director/producer/writer/actor
Harold P. Warren bet he could make a horror film by himself, and he did.Not only that, Manos was, and is,
an entertaining film, although probably not for the reasons Warren intended.Suicide Squad might have
one or two good shots and - mostly - competent acting (Will Smith's performance as Will Smith in the Will Smith role ticks all the Will Smith boxes; Margot Robbie cheekily sneaks character moments past all the editors), but it would still be a colossal
disservice to accuse it of being entertaining.

Of course, despite what I'm about to type, many people will enjoy Suicide Squad for many different reasons, and more power to them. To drag out the emaciated cliche, "It'd be a dull world if we all liked the same things." Of course, having said that...

Someone in Hollywood’s fed all those huckstering How-To-Write-An-Accountant-Moistening-Movie-Script books into a Transformer, and Suicide Squad is the soulless, cliché-recipe subsequently squeezed out through the machine's inky printer-sphincter.Make no mistake, you’ve seen all of this before: for a start, the whole final act's from 1984’s Ghostbusters.

There was a joke doing the rounds when The Sopranos was about to cut to black for the last time: any recap of the preceding episodes would need to be days long, in order
to bring a casual viewer up to speed.Suicide Squad feels like that’s actually happened.In their greedy rush to catch up with the franchises they scavenge behind, DC’ve compressed so many characters, backstories and events
together it plays more like a ‘Previously…
on Suicide Squad’, than a coherent narrative.

The team who made Suicide Squad's trailers have been cursed by their success.The sections they’ve been tasked with
‘enhancing’ are, in long-form, clumsy and ludicrous. Anyone unlucky enough to’ve experienced
the Michael Bay produced ‘reboot’ of The Hitcher should start feeling uncomfortable
right now.Also, the use of familiar songs is
cynical.Some cigar-chomping mogul
noticed that the Bohemian Rhapsody promos were getting better reviews than Batman v Superman, and decided it must be the music that was responsible. Simple. Add more tunes the peasants
and livestock’ll recognise and the money’ll print itself.The songs in Suicide Squad are even more misjudged than each contractually-obligated Piece for the Proms Murray Gold gets to
emit every year Doctor Who’s on the TV.There’s no artistry to the choices,
which is why they sound like a temp score.

Speaking of desperately rolling turds in glitter. I’m willing to bet someone
else’s money that I can identify every scene recorded during the infamous, and
very expensive, reshoots.Most of the Bar Scene for a start.Touted as something that’ll
astound, it’s exactly what a script-squirting algorithm would
think of as ‘character moments’.To paraphrase
Alan Moore’s glorious D.R. & Quinch, “scar tissue adds character, man.”

Ah.Alan Moore.The hairy, snake-worshipping magician in the
room.Yeah, let’s talk about Alan Moore shall
we?Especially as, despite attempts to hide
the evidence by throwing reshoots over it, Zack Snyder’s involvement in this
film is still honkingly obvious.And I don't just mean the scene he directed. Or the massive smiley badge filling the screen at one point. (To be fair to Snyder, the badge is only really there as a greasy, 'Funk you, you funking hippie!' from DC.)

The decision to use Zack Snyder as DC's 'through-vision' to success was
obviously going to result in a mess like this.Anyone who understands how comics work could it see it coming as soon as Snyder disgraced himself all over Watchmen, an adaptation that simply revealed that he didn’t
have a clue what the damn thing was about, but just thought it looked cool.Snyder’s vision is limited solely by his
inability to understand that all those words in comics are there for a reason, and are often just as important as the
art (no matter how cool that art may be). Alan
Moore has apologised more than enough, even though it’s not his fault, for Watchmen's legacy. The work's been enthusiastically misinterpreted for decades by folk who got trapped in the
surface. Watchmen's beautiful narrative structures - the illusions and allusions, reflections and reversions, all designed to highlight effects only available
in the comics medium - were largely ignored by the next generation of Hot Artists. Like mosquitoes staring through the glass face of a watch, unable to comprehend the hidden interacting layers of careful precision implied, and rubbing themselves to mimic ticking, the deconstructive aspects of Watchmen, itself based on a satire of superheroes from the Fifties,2 were decoded as: TITS! GUTS! GUNS! VIOLENCE! RUDE WORDS! POUCHES!These artists (and writers) completely failed to understand that the work they worshiped was showing that ridiculous children’s characters would fit no more
comfortably into a complex, consensual reality with consequences,than an enraged bear would remain quietly in its seat during a film premiere. I’ve discussed this at tedious length before,
so at this point we should return to why Suicide Squad's scary.

Suicide Squad feels like a music video.3It also feels like
watching someone else play a video game.The structure, such as it is, acts like a set up for each new level. The dialogue does nothing more than explain to the audience what they’re about to see.Characters are introduced
as though they can be upgraded later; more than one feels as though they’ve
been unlocked after the completion of a level, turning up out of nowhere,
solely to fulfill an obvious plot function in the almost-totally-CGI climactic
battle.Perhaps it’s been based on the
Arkham series.Ultimately though, who cares?

To touch on the Intellectual Properties briefly (it hardly seems fair to dignify them
with the term ‘characters’ as they’re only there to shift t-shirts), some
mention should be made as to how repugnant they all are.Yes, even Will Smith (whose orthodontist deserves his own credit).Why are the audience supposed to sympathise with these
scumbags again?The female characters
are also dealt a particularly unpleasant hand, from Amanda Exposition to the
gratuitous ogling over the other three.Maybe I’m getting old, but it seems there’s a far finer dividing line
between empowerment and misogyny than I’d previously realised.Living, as I do, in a country that has a
mature attitude to guns, the scenes of firepower porn’re just tedious, for reasons we’ve not quite reached yet.

In fairness to Jared Leto, he manages to achieve something that no
other actor playing the Joker has ever nailed, by delivering, hands-down, the
worst-ever interpretation of the Clown Prince of Crime.Deleted
scenes (and probably illegal 'gifts' to fellow performers) be damned, this children's entertainer can’t hold a
lubricated candle to even Caesar Romero, an actor who felt so little respect for the character of the Joker that he refused to shave
his moustache off for filming.The abusive
relationship between the Joker and Harley Quinn could be played as something
complex, but that’s not what we’re here for, so what we get is stupid, ignorant and astounding
that it made it to the screen, especially when Cap'n Boomerang’s rumoured bigotry doesn’t seem to've.

America is a young country, it doesn’t have legends. The upcoming American Gods adaptation will probably address both those points.A culture's popular entertainment reveals a huge amount about what’s going
on behind the curtains.Suicide Squad, unfortunately, seems to be an
accurate, if broad-sweeping, portrayal of America itself: dressing children’s
characters in adult themes and pretending that this makes them edgy and grown-up; mistaking
money, shimmer, glimmer, glam and bling for talent and worth; believing that violence is the only answer. Might makes right, motherfunker. Whether it's ignorance or, more likely, immaturity that causes the
confusion of weaponry and the basic mammalian reproductive drive doesn't really matter. Immaturity seems more likely, because
of America's odd inability to have an adult conversation about the mechanical action
that, whether they like it or not, manufactured everyone living there. Humans aren't miracles, not even Fox News viewers.

Even more troubling is Snyder’s Justice Team America crusade, apparently adopted as a deliberate echo of his country’s
attitude to the rest of the species clinging to this rock.In Snyder/DC's films, America represents the sole defence against the threatening, faceless
hordes of the Other. Only their might can make it right, everyone else being too lazy, stupid or weak to rise to the challenge. To quote Ms Quinn, they/we're all "pussies".There’s no nuance here.These are absolutes that religious
fundamentalists wouldn’t have to make a huge leap to identify with.Suicide Squad is shallow propaganda. That’s what makes it scary.

Marvel are basically a Burger King variation, DC're the Hamburglar.Both have almost identical menus with enough variations in decor, costumes and vegetarian options to differentiate who you're giving money to.Work-made-for-hire is like employing a chef who’s achieved a reputation elsewhere to offer their
own spin on a Whopper or a Big Mac or a superhero (calling them ‘metahumans’
ain’t fooling no-one).Once the company've received this critical darling's new recipe they offer a taste of it to the peasants and livestock to see how it
tests.When those results come back the recipe's altered according to more closely suit the test audience's tastes, creating a hybrid that nobody really wants.

The talent, if it knows what's good for it, keeps its mouth shut, does what the contract states, kisses the ring and takes the cash. As we’ve seen recently, we don't need no ‘experts’ no more.Pol Pot wasn’t keen on 'experts' either, let’s not forget that.

America’s legends are franchised children’s heroes, just as their exported restaurants
are franchised chains.Both are fast,
memetic, market-driven and disposable.Ultimately, both are junk food. Fun, filling, comfortingly predictable, but also nutritionally basic, unhealthy and potentially lethal as an exclusive diet.

2. As usual, Mr Moore's Scottish Tribute Act's mistaken on this point (just like he was with the ending of The Killing Joke).

3. In fairness I typed this before Die Antwoord's accusations made the news. Freeky. Die Antwoord've been creating some complex, intriguing, brave, powerful and important art (yes, it is) for years now. Their accusations don't exactly damage any of my observations about Watchmen either.4